1986/Baars
Ideas Parts ; Introduction: Scientific Psychology in Search of a Framework For at least 50 years, until very recently, scientific psychology was dominated by a philosophy of science known as behaviorism. Behaviorism is, in many ways, a radical position. Many behaviorists denied the legitimacy of ideas such as consciousness, thinking, feelings, motives, plans, purposes, images, knowledge, or the self. Much of the everyday vocabulary we take for granted in describing human behavior and experience was rejected as unscientific. Thus the most prestigious form of psychology, taught in all major colleges and universities, utterly rejected the major psychological concepts of Western thought. The reasons for this radical rejection of everyday ideas are complex; they involve not only the historical circumstances under which experimental psychology came about and was maintained, especially in the United States, but also the philosophical issue of the mind-body problem, and the nature of science. All of these reasons will be touched on in the course of this book. Over the past several decades, however, a significant shift has taken place in the research community, away from behaviorism and toward a "cognitive" or "information-processing" position. Fewer scholars at major universities now call themselves behaviorists in the traditional sense. In fact, "behaviorism" is often referred to in the past tense, and many commonsense notions of human experience and action are again gaining wide currency in the scientific literature. This shift has been referred to as "the cognitive revolution in psychology" (e.g., Dember, 1974:; Joynson, 1970; Weimer & Palermo, 1973; Palermo, 1971), and this book presents the thoughts of some of the most prominent psychologists who figured on both sides of this conceptual revolution. The changes that have occurred in the last 20 years or so can be interpreted from different vantage points, and will undoubtedly be the source of many disagreements. But no one doubts that something has happened, and that it is fundamental. Sociologists and philosophers of science may differ on how best to characterize the "cognitive revolution," but for working scientists in psychology, the effects of the shift have been concrete and practical: Topics and phenomena that were rejected as "unscientific" are again the subject of lively thinking and experimentation, and much of the 19th-century psychology of Wilhelm Wundt, William James, and others has become relevant again. And conversely, research topics that constituted the very core of the scientific approach to psychology a few decades ago are now dormant, and often considered to be contrived or irrelevant. Along with this, the "reference experiments" that seemed to provide analogues for all other problems have changed. Experiments in animal associationism, such as the work of Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner, seem less relevant now to many psychologists. Reputations have fallen, and reputations have been made. A number of workers who were trained under the older viewpoint are sympathetic to the cognitive revolution, yet seem unable to disengage from the older point of view. The editorial control of journals has shifted, and new journals have sprung up. Along with this have come the new buzz-words -- "cognitive," "information processing," "structure," "organization," "psycho-linguistics," and so on. The human cost has sometimes been considerable. Human experimental psychology has been the major focus of the cognitive revolution, but other areas of psychology are beginning to feel the impact. Animal psychology has long been the stronghold of a behaviorism, but recent work indicates the beginnings of a shift there, too (e.g., Hulse, Fowler, & Honig, 1978). Developmental psychology has been similarly affected. And even clinical work with emotionally disturbed people, which has gained the most practical benefits from behavioral ideas and findings, may be shifting in a more cognitive direction (e.g., Mahoney & Arnkoff, 1978; Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979). Why should anyone outside the field really care about these specialized debates between scholars? Are they not, in fact, very far removed from our everyday concerns? The cognitive revolution warrants general interest for several reasons" : 1. The experimental psychology community has made a profound effort to apply scientific methods to the study of human beings. At times the operative conception of "scientific method" may have been naive or based on excessive borrowing from the physical sciences. Nevertheless, both behaviorism and cognitive psychology represents efforts to be as objective as mere humans can be about ourselves, and neither can be understood apart from this devotion to an idealistic conception of science. Both the behavioristic and cognitive paradigms represent cases of "scientism" in modern life, certainly one of the dominant themes of this century. If the turning away from the behavioristic approach represents a case of "scientism gone wrong," it should concern all of us as a demonstrated limit of what is perhaps the deepest faith of the 20th century. : 2. The cognitive revolution may represent a living example of a "scientific revolution. Historians and sociologists of science are currently much concerned with the nature of scientific revolutions -- radical shifts in the viewpoints of whole research communities (Kuhn, 1962). The best-known examples of such shifts are associated with the great names in the history of science: the Copernican revolution, the Einsteinian revolution, the Darwinian, and so on. It has been argued that the cognitive shift is not at all like these classical revolutions; yet the basic phenomenon -- a relatively sudden turnabout in the perspective of a community of scientists -- is very similar. Most important, it is happening today, and the majority of the participants in this remarkable even in the life of a scientific community are still alive to give us their impressions. : 3. Because their work carries the status of science, experimental psychologists are highly influential. Experimentalists have tremendous long-term influence not only over the lives of college students, but also over practicing psychologists, educators, social workers, and others in the "helping professions." Today's research ideas are likely to show up elsewhere -- not tomorrow, for there is a considerable time lag before ideas become widely known -- but within the next 5 or 10 years. On most college campuses psychology is the most popular subject. But because of the time lag between research and teaching, many undergraduate students even today are taught the behavioristic perspective on human psychology as if it were still dominant in the thinking of researchers. : 4. The scientific approach may yet succeed in understanding human nature. Probably most scientific psychologists would agree that our understanding is quite limited. But nothing is more fascinating to most of us than the study of humanity itself, and this book may, in a sense, be treated as a progress report on the historic quest for scientific certainty in our understanding of human beings and the human puzzle. Even those who view science with suspicion have reason to care about the course of experimental psychology: We have enough experience today with the benefits and drawbacks of successful science to know that the more widely a scientific approach is understood, the less likely it is to be misused. If war is too important to be left to the generals, then certainly scientific psychology is too important to be left to the psychologists. In spite of what some popular figures have said about scientific psychology, we in the field are not about to manipulate masses of people against their will. Indeed, current research findings might be held to suggest the impressive capability of people to resist manipulation. This book tends, if anything, to emphasize the limits of our current understanding of human beings, and the researchers whose words are recorded herein are very frank about those limits. In yet a different way, I hope that these interviews reveal the human dimension of psychologists as they devote their professional lives as extending our knowledge about ourselves. Certainly there are failures, and doubts, and some of the less praiseworthy aspects of humanity have their role here as elsewhere. Overall, experimental psychologists are dedicated to a compulsion that all of us share to some degree: the pursuit of knowledge, the attempted satisfaction of a fathomless curiosity about mankind. They have tried to pursue this ideal in a highly disciplined way, refusing to claim anything unless they could prove their claim in the most rigorous way. Sometimes this great cautiousness makes psychologists appear silly, as when they seem to explain laboriously, or even to deny, some utterly commonplace fact. But it must be understood that scientific standards of evidence are much more demanding than those we use in everyday life -- in fact, it may be this self-disciplined approach that has ultimately led to the power of the scientific approach in so many areas of life. ; The Cognitive Revolution as a Change ; in the Metatheory of Psychology Roughly in the decade from 1955 to 1965 a quiet revolution in thought took place among many research psychologists. The dominant metatheory of the previous 50 years was discarded or changed fundamentally, and a new point of view began to take shape. A "metatheory" in science is a viewpoint about how one goes about doing the science, and because psychology is a young and, in many ways, uncertain discipline, its metatheories are even more important than its theories. The theories that psychologist propose to explain their observations are usually quite limited and prone to change, but the metatheory defines the field itself, often for many decades. Psychologists may disagree about any particular topic, but if they share the same metatheory, they will be able to agree on what constitutes evidence for or against their claims. On the other hand, if they cannot define their standards of evidence or their views about the proper domain for psychology, scientific work and communication become nearly impossible. Thus, it is of major importance that the hahavioristic metatheory, which defined the scientific approach to psychology from about 1913 to about 1960, has undergone a fundamental change, a change so profound that most active researchers began to refer to the new point of view with a new name: usually, "cognitive psychology" or "information-processing psychology." This new metatheory has not yet spread to all areas of psychological research, but everywhere, there is a strong trend in a cognitive direction. Behavioristic influence does remain strong, however, in those areas where it has apparently been very fruitful, especially in animal research and clinical psychology. And because history seldom fits our categories very neatly, it may be that the behavioral influence in these areas will continue to be strong for some time. Views Cites